


Mud

by Blame Canada (OneHitWondersAnonymous)



Series: South Park Drabble Bomb: May 2017 [1]
Category: South Park
Genre: Body Horror, Dreams and Nightmares, Graphic Description, Horror, M/M, Mental Breakdown, Mental Instability, Nightmare Fuel, Not Shippy, Psychological Drama, The Ship Is There But Not Really, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-21
Updated: 2017-05-21
Packaged: 2018-11-03 09:18:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,246
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10964280
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OneHitWondersAnonymous/pseuds/Blame%20Canada
Summary: Sometimes reality and dreams are hard to distinguish, and it's harder for Tweek than most.His brain was a very scary place to be trapped inside.Rated T for Graphic Violence and swearing. Submission for the third day's prompt of the May 2017 South Park Drabble Bomb: Mud.





	Mud

**Author's Note:**

> Hello friends, to my first fully completed submission to the May 2017 South Park Drabble Bomb, of which I am the host! This story is best enjoyed with less prelude, so I leave you with nothing else but a warning that this is a little on the creepy, artsy side.

Tweek awoke, for once in his very exhausting life, with the feeling that he’d gotten the perfect amount of rest. He blinked once, twice, three times slowly, dusting away the nighttime sleepies from his eyes with thick blond lashes. He rolled to his back and slipped his little hands from under the comforter, stretching his arms straight up to the ceiling and clenching them into fists to loosen up his swollen fingers. At the same time, he arched his back slowly in a big full-body stretch. He sighed with the breath he exaggerated upon releasing his muscles and falling back into his soft bed. Instead of feeling worn his bones felt so wonderfully rejuvenated. He slid his attention over to his bedroom window, where his curtains ruffled gently in the slight breeze sweeping in through a screen. The sunlight cast a lattice over his bed and he wiggled his toes inside one of the squares. He smiled; he couldn’t remember the last time he smiled before noon.

With a yawn he swung his legs over the side of his bed and stretched his arms up again, making a final reach deep within his spine to loosen it up for the day. He stood on wobbly legs and shuffled across the carpet, avoiding piles of Legos and other miscellaneous fidgeting toys he kept in large supply at all times. His socks were slippery against the hardwood of the hall and tile in the bathroom, and he inspected his face for new blemishes at the same time he brushed his teeth. He rinsed out his mouth five times, as was tradition, and he turned the lights off, on, off again, like always. It was turning out to be a beautiful Saturday morning.

“Mom? Dad?” He called out to the rest of the house, but no answer meant his parents were already at the coffee shop, which relieved him. He took careful steps down the wooden staircase toward the kitchen, where Craig stood with a coffee pot in hand. Tweek smiled and touched his arm.

Craig turned to him and his face was full of maggots.

Tweek shrieked and stumbled backwards, but in one blink, the maggots disappeared, and Craig’s usual (albeit startled) face remained. “Tweek? What’s wrong, baby?” He asked.

Craig never used pet names, but for some reason, Tweek wasn’t bothered by it. Actually, the fact that Craig’s face had just moments before been nothing but rotting flesh and disgusting creepy-crawlies didn’t concern him at all either. What he cared more about was the coffee pot in Craig’s idle hand.

“It’s for you,” Craig said, reading his mind, and Tweek hopped up to kiss his cheek in thanks. He used the kitchen island to swing himself around to take a seat at one of the barstools, but suddenly, when he looked down, a gigantic crack opened down the center of the floorboards, and the chair he was about to take fell straight into a pool of lava.

Tweek yelped in surprise and hopped back. “What’s wrong?” Craig asked again, but when Tweek made a double take between his boyfriend and the floor, he found the crack in the earth nowhere to be seen, and there was no evidence anything had fallen open at all.

“It’s nothing,” Tweek said, entirely unfazed, and he hoisted himself onto one of the barstools while Craig poured him a cup of fresh coffee. He prepared it just as he liked it, with just the right amount of cream and sugar. All the while, a sinking feeling of dread began to permeate Tweek’s stomach. He began to feel ill, and he curled in on himself with a weak groan. Craig didn’t seem to notice, and kept humming a tune while he put the creamer back into the fridge.

“For you, darling,” he said, and Tweek hesitated, because he had never heard the word darling fall from his boyfriend’s lips. It was off-putting. Tweek felt like there was something extremely wrong. Panic began to consume him, but he looked down at his coffee mug and sighed shakily. Coffee always helped.

He hooked his right hand through the handle of the cup and rested his elbows on the countertop. Craig watched him with a wide, almost unnatural smile, and Tweek returned it with a shaky laugh before bringing the cup to his lips. Immediately upon tipping back the porcelain, though, he choked.

After a few gagging coughs and nearly tossing the cup to the counter, he pulled his hand back from his mouth to inspect whatever wet and gritty substance he’d ingested that was definitely not coffee. In his hand, a huge pile of dark, wet, smelly mud oozed between his fingers.

Mud. He’d tried to drink mud.

Tweek gasped and flung the mud from his hand, most of it sticking to it despite his best efforts, and with wobbly hands he took back the mug to see that it was filled to the brim with soupy dirt. A worm was wiggling around half-surfaced for good measure. He gagged again just looking at it. He felt sick.

“Craig, what the fuck?!” He screeched. “Why did you give me this?!”

“What do you mean, dear?” Craig said with a slight cock of his head sideways and a frown. “You always take your coffee like this.”

“This is mud, look!” Tweek said, and he shoved the mug over to Craig’s hands. Craig eyed him warily.

“I don’t understand, sweetheart.” Craig took a long swig of the disgusting contents and Tweek wildly protested, but when Craig put the cup back down, Tweek saw that it looked like an ordinary cup of coffee once again. “I don’t like coffee much, you know, but it seems fine to me.”

Tweek was trembling in a way he hadn’t done in years. Something was horribly, unexplainably _wrong_ right now and he had no way to fix it. He took the cup back, cautiously, and he kept his eyes on the liquid while he slowly raised it back to his lips. It remained a liquid all the way until it touched his tongue, where it congealed into a gooey, germ-filled mess that belonged under boots and most certainly not inside mouths. Tweek gagged on it again.

“What’s happening?” He cried out, grabbing the mug and throwing it at the ground as hard as he possibly could, despite Craig’s objection. When it made contact with the floor it changed back, and creamy brown liquid splattered across the floor and burned his ankle slightly where it was exposed to the scattered droplets.

“Tweek!” Craig yelled suddenly, and he took Tweek by the shoulders roughly across the counter, shaking him back and forth. “Tweek, don’t drink the coffee, Tweek! Don’t drink it darling, it’ll turn to mud, and kill you!” Craig’s frantic eyes frightened him, as it was an expression he’d only seen once before on his boyfriend’s face and that was when he’d nearly died. He nodded, over and over again until his vision became blurry. A sound like the screeches of a thousand damned souls overtook his hearing, but within them, he heard screams in Craig’s voice, repeating “no more, no more, no more!”

 

No more!

 

No more!

 

No more!

 

…

 

Tweek awoke with a scream.

His eyes snapped open and darted back and forth, so quickly he failed to focus on anything at all, until Craig’s soft, real voice cooed to him through his distressed whimpering.

“It’s alright, Tweek. You were yelling. I’m sorry, I had to wake you up.”

Tweek began to catch his breath, raising a shaky hand to his chest as though it could still his rapidly beating heart. He licked his dry and cracked lips, trembling terribly until Craig leaned down to awkwardly wrap his arms around him. “You gonna make it?” Craig murmured in his ear, and Tweek shuddered at the close contact before wrapping his arms as tightly as he could around his shoulders, nodding wildly.

“S-sorry.” He took one more deep breath in and out, and when Craig pulled away he gave him an unsteady smile. “Just a bad dream.”

“I figured.” Craig stepped back and held out a hand for Tweek to yank himself from bed with, and he landed with a soft slap of his soles against the floor. With time he began to realize just how ridiculous his dream had been, even though it felt alarmingly real. He sighed in relief at the gentle hold Craig had on his fingers as he led him to the living room.

“How’d you get in here so early?”

“Tweek, it’s eleven o’ clock,” Craig deadpanned. “I break into your house all the time anyway, though. Shouldn’t be all that surprising.” He shrugged.

“Yeah, still…” He muttered under his breath, vivid flashes of his nightmare hitting him in waves. They were shuffling into the kitchen now and Tweek had a unique sense of déjà vu as he sat in a barstool at the kitchen island.

Craig reached for the same coffee pot as his dream, and it wasn’t until after he bristled that Tweek realized it’d be ridiculous of him to be suspicious of it, since it was the pot he’d always owned. Craig must have brewed it for him, ahead of time.

He poured him a mug that he nearly overfilled and Tweek smiled appreciatively. Craig nodded and turned away to replace the pot. When Tweek looked back down at his cup, though, he was met with the same grotesque image as in his nightmare.

Instead of the bittersweet release he always craved, mud was piled inside the mug in a sludgy pile. Tweek gasped and the mug fell from his hands, landing on the countertop on an angle and splattering everywhere over the surface. Craig turned around in fright, but Tweek paid him no mind, for where mud was supposed to spread over the granite countertop, smooth liquid pooled around the cracked mug instead. Tweek screeched in what was half annoyance, half fear.

“What? What’d I do?” Craig asked, looking puzzled, and his face only morphed to more concern when Tweek let out a wailing sob.

“My coffee keeps turning to mud, Craig!” He cried, throwing his face in his hands and gripping his hair, hard. He yanked at it to ground himself, muttering and gasping obscenities under his breath.

“Tweek,” Craig said slowly, carefully, “have you been taking your medicine?”

“I- Yes, of course!” Tweek paused, letting his inquiry sink in. “I’m not going crazy, I’m not hallucinating, I swear it keeps happening! Watch!” He scrambled from his chair and whipped around the bend, on a mission to prove himself. He grabbed the coffee pot, and even before he could pour his own mug full of it, an earthworm poked out from the spout, and he dropped it with a terrified yelp.

The pot bounced on the floor, as it was made of plastic instead of glass, but the hot coffee still splashed from its uncovered top, and Tweek hardly noticed as the scalding liquid burned his feet. It was coffee again, when it had been mud. “What’s happening to me?” He whispered urgently, hands immediately reaching up to snatch fistfuls of hair, and he tugged enough to yank tiny tufts of it from his scalp. He grunted at the sting and would have kept going of Craig didn’t grab his wrists.

“Tweek, Tweek! Calm down!” Craig yelled, and Tweek looked up at him from his curled over position. His face was fretful, but within seconds, it transformed into a horrible gaping mouth full of hundreds of sharp teeth. The jaws gaped and the Craig-monster hissed, and Tweek let out a blood-curdling scream before pivoting on one heel and sprinting away from him.

He turned back to see the monster following him, jaws snapping open and shut as it chased him. The chorus of voices from the end of his last dream came to him and replaced the sound of blood rushing through his ears, chanting the same thing Craig had before he turned into a monster.

 

No more!

 

No more!

 

No more!

 

…

 

Tweek awoke feeling like ten hangovers hit him at once. He didn’t want to get out of bed. He was now thoroughly afraid of what might greet him behind his bedroom door. This time he woke up alone, like the first time, but he was totally alone with no Craig anywhere in sight. He was the age he was supposed to be, he guessed, judging from the scenery, but he was still wary. He very slowly got out of bed like a sudden movement would allow the matrix to collapse in on him, and he yawned heavy and low on his way to the bathroom.

Upon tromping into the kitchen to pour his first cup of coffee, Tweek hesitated.

He hesitated long and hard.

 

No more?

 

As he tipped the pot to pour into his mug, thick grime sloshed into the cup instead of coffee. He shoved the mug and the pot away and put his head in his hands.

 

No more.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

When Craig crawled through the Tweaks’ window that afternoon, he found Tweek lying on his side on the kitchen tile, drool crusting over his cheek and into the grooves of the floor, with the words “no more” bouncing quietly from his quivering lips over and over. Right before Tweek’s eyes, the coffee he’d spilled on the floor flashed between liquid and goopy solid.

Craig saw cold coffee and bloodied fingertips.


End file.
